So, weâre now secure. Apologies for what might well have been several months of downtime for many readers. The mysteries of secure sockets, certificates, caches and domain records has hopefully been sorted by the good people at Nethosted, leaving us ⊠Continue reading â
i only use google for work these days and, boy oh boy, does it stink. i followed this to make it suck a little less: https://tenbluelinks.org/
Not everyone is a fan of AI Overviews. | Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge
If youâve searched for something on Google lately, you mightâve noticed a wall of text that appears before the actual search results. This feature, called AI Overviews, offers an AI-generated answer to certain queries. But it also pushes your list of links further down the page, which makes it a bit annoying to scroll past when you want to do your own research â and it will get even more annoying once Google starts stuffing ads into it.
But even though Google doesnât let you disable the feature, there are a few ways around it.
One of the best ways to âturn offâ the feature is to reconfigure your browserâs default search engine options. The website tenbluelinks offers instructions on how to do this in Chrome on Android, iOS, Windows, and...
i revisited 9 to 5 last night and he remains excellent, along with the rest of that cast
Photo: Jim Britt /Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
Dabney Coleman, the actor who bossed Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton around in the 1980 comedy 9 to 5, died at his home in Santa Monica on Thursday. He was 92. His daughter, Quincy Coleman, confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter. âMy father crafted his time here on Earth with a curious mind, a generous heart and a soul on fire with passion, desire and humor that tickled the funny bone of humanity,â she said in a statement. âAs he lived, he moved through this final act of his life with elegance, excellence and mastery. A teacher, a hero and a king, Dabney Coleman is a gift and blessing in life and in death as his spirit will shine through his work, his loved ones and his legacy ⊠eternally.â
Born in Austin, Texas in 1932, Coleman studied acting at Sanford Meisnerâs Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre from 1958 to 1960. But it was in his forties that he really became a household name. In a 2010 interview with Vulture, Coleman credited that shift in popularity to the soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman for showcasing his comedic chops. (He also theorized that growing his signature âstache helped.) Ultimately, Coleman developed a reputation for playing on-screen jerks in movies and shows such as 9 to 5, Buffalo Bill, Tootsie, Boardwalk Empire,and more. âItâs fun playing those roles,â he told Vulture. âYou get to do outlandish things, things that you want to do, probably, in real life but you just donât because youâre a civilized human being. There are no holds barred when youâre playing [jerks] â I couldnât imagine anyone not loving playing those parts.â
Over the course of his decades-long career, Coleman won an Emmy Award for his supporting role in Sworn to Silence, a Golden Globe for Best Actor for The Slap Maxwell Story, and two SAG awards as part of the ensemble cast of Boardwalk Empire. More recently, he guest starred as John Dutton Sr. in Yellowstone. He is survived by four children and five grandchildren.
the premise is the best part of this movie and is what makes it worth watching. give it a stream, but know it's not perfect
Courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder
Horror films live and die by their conceits. And sometimes, the best way to make a movie scary is to place it in an environment thatâs not scary at all.
Is there anything further from spooky than a brightly lit TV studio? The surprise box office darlingLate Night with the Devil, which hit horror streamer Shudder this weekend (and might be more suited to home viewing), tries to make one of the most innocuous American broadcast traditions into a terror. David Dastmalchian, a character actor who youâll recognize from the margins of half a dozen Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve movies, gets a rare star turn as Jack Delroy, the host of late-night talk show Night Owls. But in an era where Johnny Carson rules after-hours broadcast,...
Anyway, hereâs Patel on the limitations of AI and where humans shine:
But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas.
And I think that the power of human beings sort of having new ideas all the time, thatâs the thing that the platforms wonât be able to find. Thatâs why the platforms feel old. Social platforms like enter a decay state where everyoneâs making the same thing all the time. Itâs because weâve optimized for the distribution, and people get bored and that boredom actually drives much more of the culture than anyone will give that credit to, especially an A.I. developer who can only look backwards.
Later he talks more specifically about why curation will grow more important in a world inundated with aggressively mid AI content:
And the idea is, in my mind at least, that those people who curate the internet, who have a point of view, who have a beginning and middle, and an end to the story theyâre trying to tell all the time about the culture weâre in or the politics weâre in or whatever. They will actually become the centers of attention and you cannot replace that with A.I. You cannot replace that curatorial function or that guiding function that weâve always looked to other individuals to do.
And those are real relationships. I think those people can stand in for institutions and brands. I think the New York Times, youâre Ezra Klein, a New York Times journalist means something. It appends some value to your name, but the institution has to protect that value. I think that stuff is still really powerful, and I think as the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people, combined with a powerful institution who protects their integrity actually will go up. I donât think thatâs going to go down.
Yeah, exactly. Individuals and groups of like-minded people making things for other people â that stuff is only going to grow more valuable as time goes on. The breadth and volume offered by contemporary AI cannot provide this necessary function right now (and IMO, for the foreseeable future).
And finally, I wanted to share this exchange:
EZRA KLEIN: You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest, single things Iâve heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy, but an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.
NILAY PATEL: Yeah first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something â at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content.
I never focused on traffic all that much, mainly because for a small site like kottke.org, there wasnât a whole lot I could do, vis-Ă -vis Google or Facebook, to move the needle that much. But as Iâve written many times, switching to a reader-supported model in 2016 with the membership program has just worked so well for the site because it allows me to focus on making something for those readers â thatâs you! â and not for platforms or algorithms or advertisers. I donât have to âpivot to videoâ; instead I can do stuff like comments and [new thing coming âsoonâ] that directly benefit and engage readers, which has been really rewarding.
Perhaps the platform era caused us to lose track of what a Web site was for. The good ones are places you might turn to several times per day or per week for a select batch of content that pointedly is not everything. Going there regularly is a signal of intention and loyalty: instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you what to read, you can seek out reading materials-or videos or audio-from sources you trust. If Twitter was once a sprawling Home Depot of content, going to specific sites is more like shopping from a series of specialized boutiques.
Iâm going to get slightly petty here for a sec and say that these âback to the blog / back to the webâ pieces almost always ignore the sites that never gave up the faith in favor of âmediaâ folks inspired by the former. Itâs nice to see the piece end with a mention of Arts & Letters Daily, still bloggily chugging along since 1998. /salty
Congratulations to young Cooper [Last Name Withheld] of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, who recently travelled to the coastal Belgian town of De Panne and took home the crown in the EC Gull Screeching competition, which is apparently a real thing. Yes, that would be a seagull screeching competition. â Read the rest
i saw this last night. it was super uneven, but the fun/scary parts were so fantastic. the cast was also outstanding
Photo: Shudder/YouTube
The devil works hard â end of sentence. Late Night with the Devil had a fittingly satanic opening weekend, not only coming in 6th place at the box office, but also bringing in a reported $666,666 on Sunday of all days, according to Variety. That amount contributed to its $2.8 million weekend total, which is a much less eerie number.
If youâre looking to ward off evil spirits after hearing that news, look no further than the film that snagged the number one spot this weekend, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which exceeded expectations with a North American total of $42 million. Dune: Part 2 held the number two spot with $17.6 million, closely followed by Kung Fu Panda 4âs $16.8 million. If thatâs not enough to ward off the devil, Sydney Sweeneyâs religious horror movie Immaculate took the fourth place spot with $5.3 million. Maybe she can perform an exorcism on the box office.
A small number of shuttered golf courses around the country have been bought by land trusts, municipalities and nonprofit groups and transformed into nature preserves, parks and wetlands. Among them are sites in Detroit, Pennsylvania, Colorado, the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and at least four in California.
âWe quickly recognized the high restoration value, the conservation value, and the public access recreational value,â said Guillermo Rodriguez, California state director with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which bought the San Geronimo course, in Marin County, for $8.9 million in 2018 and renamed it San Geronimo Commons.
The article also shares this startling fact: âThe United States has more golf courses than McDonaldâs locations.â WAT.
After the Jan 6 attack on Congress, a woman went on Bumble to help the FBI identify rioters. âHer strategyâŠwas saying âWow, crazy, tell me moreâ to guys on repeat until they gave her enough for her to send their information to the FBI.â
And now, in the category of Shows You Must See Based Only on the Description: Cole Escola is making their off-Broadway debut in Oh, Mary! Written by the actor and comedian, itâs centered on Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks leading up to Honest Abeâs assassination. Escola, of course, will play Mary Todd. Are you not sold yet? Oh, Mary! will be directed by Sam Pinkleton (Here We Are), which brings exactly the prestige that a show examining âthe forgotten life and dreams of Mrs. Lincoln through the lens of an idiotâ deserves. Oh, Mary! begins previews at the Lucille Lortel Theater on January 26, before opening on February 8 for a limited eight-week run. Get ready, because the wiggiest production of the season is coming our way.
Update, October 16: Around 50 percent of staff at Bandcamp have been laid off after Epic sold the platform to Songtradr. Several staff members of the siteâs editorial arm, Bandcamp Daily, were among those laid off, theysharedonX. When Epic announced the sale, the gaming company said not all employees would receive offers from Songtradr. âThese are not new layoffs,â Epic told Vulture in a statement today, adding that laid off employees would receive severance from Epic. Songtradr, a licensing company, previously confirmed on October 5 that the layoffs would occur. âBased on its current financials, Bandcamp requires some adjustments,â the company said. Bandcamp United, the workersâ union, had previously asked Songtradr to offer employment to all current Bandcamp staff, along with voluntary severance, after the sale. Songtradr has yet to recognize the union.
âOver the past few years the operating costs of Bandcamp have significantly increased. It required some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy company that can serve its community of artists and fans,â Songtradr included in a statement to Vulture. âAfter a comprehensive evaluation, including the importance of roles for smooth business operations and pre existing functions at Songtradr, 50 percent of Bandcamp employees have accepted offers to join Songtradr. We are committed to keeping the existing Bandcamp services that fans and artists love, including its artist-first revenue share, Bandcamp Fridays and Bandcamp Daily.â
about half the company was laid off today. some of the most incredible people iâve ever worked with, including two of my amazing editorial colleagues @diamonde and @atoosamoinzadeh and most of the incredible support staff among many others. this is a loss, no two ways about it
Itâs game over for Epicâs ownership of Bandcamp. The indie music marketplace is being sold to Songtradr, a licensing platform, alongside broader layoffs at Epic. The sale is the second time Bandcamp has changed hands in less than two years, after the formerly independent company was purchased by Epic in March 2022. At the time, Epic committed to prioritizing artists with Bandcamp while helping the platformâs technological development. Now, the Fortnite maker is laying off 16 percent of staff â roughly 830 employees â while also dropping the marketing company SuperAwesome. âFor a while now, weâve been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators,â CEO Tim Sweeney said in a letter to employees. âI had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect, I see that this was unrealistic.â
Songtradr, in its own press release announcing the acquisition, made the same commitment to âcontinue to operate Bandcamp as a marketplace and music community with an artist-first revenue share.â The company seems to see Bandcamp as an asset to its own licensing business, describing plans to âoffer Bandcamp artists the ability and choice to have their music licensed to all forms of media including content creators, game and app developers and brands.â Additionally, Epic is investing in Songtradr amid the sale and plans to work with Songtradr to license Bandcamp music to Epic games. Sounds complicated, but as long as we can still buy our albums âŠ
i am very excited to watch planet earth III: the reckoning
Planet Earth III will begin airing later this year on BBC and, presumably, at some later time in the US. The latest installment in the legendary series, 17 years after the first one was released, will once again be presented by Sir David Attenborough, now 97 years old and still as enthusiastic about sharing the wonders of nature as he ever was.
'The opening of the series with David was filmed in the beautiful British countryside in exactly the location where Charles Darwin used to walk whilst thinking-over his Earth-shaking ideas about evolution. It seemed the perfect place for David to introduce Planet Earth III and remind us of both the wonders and the fragility of our planet. ....and for him, of course, the sun shined under blue skies one of the only days it did all summer!.'
The video above is a quick first look at the series and here's a trailer as well:
Looking forward to this...the Planet Earth series is still the gold standard for nature documentaries.
MIT Technology Review has a strangely fascinating new piece about the history of the corporate presentation. PowerPoint-esque slideshows have become ubiquitous for anyone who's ever spent a moment in a white collar or corporatized job setting. But as a narrative form â as I've now learned â the slideshow presentation dates all the way back to 1948, at an annual sales meeting for Seagram's whiskey:
No expense has been spared: there's the two-hour, professionally acted stage play about the life of a whiskey salesman.
fucking finally. recommendations are why we have Qanon
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTubeâs homepage will now look very different if you have your watch history turned off. Instead of surfacing a page full of suggested videos, youâll mostly see nothing.
The change is all part of a ânew viewer experienceâ Google announced on Tuesday. If youâve switched your YouTube watch history to off and âhave no significant prior watch history,â you wonât see features that need a watch history to provide recommendations.
That means youâll only see the search bar on the homepage, along with the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons. This could come as a welcome change for people who hate sifting through increasingly extreme thumbnails to find the play button, but it could also be a way to annoy users into turning the history...
peewee is weird, queer, and great. this christmas special is overlooked, but so fucking good. also rewatch the big adventure movie and his clips on letterman. so so good
Christmas at Pee-weeâs Playhouse, the 1988 primetime CBS special from comedian and actor Paul Reubens, is one of the strangest, most glorious, most improbable, most confident pieces of entertainment to appear on tele... More »
This advertisement from Orange, the French telecom company, about the French national football team is one of the best commercials I've seen recently. I don't want to tell you too much about it because the impact of it comes from watching it, so just watch it and you'll see. And afterwards, you can read more about the ad here.
I'm not a big trailer guy, but any information about the upcoming season of Tim Robinson's hilarious sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave is cause for celebration.
The third season is scheduled to be released on May 30.
So many of the sketches from this show have become iconic comedy classics, none more than this insane "Focus Group Sketch." â Read the rest
This 1929 drawing of the Piccadilly Circus Underground Station, by Italian engineer, architect, and designer Renzo Picasso (1880-1975), is a thing of beauty. The image is from the Renzo Picasso Archives; Strange Maps describes it:
Two Tube lines crossing at Piccadilly Circus, as seen from below ground â with buses floating on the invisible surface.
"Scientists have found a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence. The system reconstructs the gist of what a person hears or imagines"...excuse me, what?
"Scientists have found a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence. The system reconstructs the gist of what a person hears or imagines..." Wow.
The web's most important decision: CERN putting the WWW into the public domain. "Nobody owned the web, and the web wasn't licensed. It was simply a part of the world, for anybody to use, distribute, or modify."
i hope this dwayane wade story gets some traction. he seems like he's been a great ally and advocate. i also hear nothing about high profile people leaving places/calling them out and this seems like an important thing for the meejda to pick up on
So Your Kid Wants to Be a Twitch Streamer. "My son and I were out for a walk when he told me he wanted to be a streamer when he grows up. He's 11. I instantly grew a long and bushy beard."
"PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time," PBS spokesman Jason Phelps said in an email. â Read the rest
please join me in not paying any attention to this movie. the first one was SO SO SO BAD. why do we need to sustain more of these and when will we get Learned League: the mOviE?
âThe way of water connects all things. Before your birth and after your death.â Itâs an alpha move to include the part where you say the name of the movie aloud in the trailer, and this line will ... More »
In 1975, famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson traveled, at the behest of a public television station, to the US to take photographs of New Jersey.
The photographer felt that New Jerseyâs anywhere-ness, its density and diversity, was âa kind of shortcut through America.â With that prompt, Evans assembled an itinerary. Cunningham picked up Cartier-Bresson in Manhattan around sunrise each day for three weeks and headed for the bridges and tunnels. They embedded with ambulance drivers in Newark and chicken farmers in West Orange. They visited suburban sprawl, horse country, pine barrens, swamps, seashore, beauty parlors, labs, nuclear facilities, jails, mansions. They once stayed overnight in a South Jersey motel, and Cartier-Bresson insisted that they flip a coin to determine who got the bed.
It was one of his final photo projects and because his photos were cropped for use on television (âa practice Cartier-Bresson viewed as sacrilegeâ), the project was not included in most catalogues of his work and was almost forgotten.
2023 anti-trans bills tracker. "We track legislation that seeks to block trans people from receiving basic healthcare, education, legal recognition, and the right to publicly exist."
Cargo e-bikes are selling like hotcakes now. "It feels as if the industry and the government have simultaneously woken up to the enormous potential of cargo e-bikes to replace car trips and improve the environment." (via @marcprecipice)
Kenji LĂłpez-Alt Spent 5 Months Studying Chicago Thin-Crust Pizza. Here's What He Learned. "Among his many revelations: a game-changing technique for yielding that crisp crust at home."
This weekend, 41-year-old Zlatan Ibrahimovic became the oldest goal scorer in Serie A history. He could have retired after a serious knee injury last year, but he did surgery & rehab and now he's back scoring goals. Incredible.
